I first met Saint Anthony about ten years ago. I was hiking Mount Robson with a Catholic friend and just before we turned into our tent for the night, I lost something. I dug through my pack and looked all around the area where we’d cooked supper, but I couldn’t find it. As I got more and more frustrated, my friend suggested that I ask Saint Anthony to help me. At the time, I had a strong Protestant opinion about praying to saints, but I managed to bite my tongue and keep it to myself. She prayed anyways, and a minute later I found what I was looking for.
A few weeks back, my husband called me one evening as I was staring around our living room trying to see where on earth I would have put a blue binder. It had to be in that room somewhere, I knew, and how could something that big just disappear? As I grumbled into the phone, he suggested that I ask Saint Anthony to help me. I didn’t answer – now being Catholic myself – and he prayed quickly. That was when I spotted the binder on the shelf, neatly stacked beside some books it was related to.
This weekend, we were visiting friends and had ordered pizza in. When the pizza arrived, they couldn’t find their bank card. Nor could they find the keys to the car to see if the bank card had gotten left there. We searched around the house, trying to remember what we’d done when we got there and where the keys and card might have gotten put. The pizza girl waited patiently. Again, my husband thought of praying to Saint Anthony. And when, two minutes after that, we found the keys and the card sitting together on the stairs, he was quite pleased with this further proof that saints help us.
He told our friends I wouldn’t pray because of superstition, which I denied – I’m not superstitious. It did make me think about why I’m not comfortable with asking a saint for help. Maybe part of it is my independent nature – I’m stubborn about doing things myself and not asking for help. I think, however, it’s more a feeling that such things are minor and I shouldn’t be bothering a saint – or God – over them. I’m the one who lost something because of my forgetfulness or disorganization, so I should solve it on my own. I feel like those in heaven might be busy with bigger problems.
Or maybe it’s still lingering Protestant feelings about praying “to” the saints, though my husband has over and over explained that we don’t pray “to” them. We just ask them to pray for us, as we’d ask another friend (on earth) to pray for us. Still, asking Saint Anthony to pray that I find a binder that I know is somewhere in a small living room seems a bit trivial. And yet doesn’t God tell us that He counts the hairs on our heads and not even a sparrow can fall without Him noticing? So maybe it isn’t so trivial. Maybe there’s a reason He designated one person to be in charge of praying for things lost.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Books, Books, Books
I got home from work last week absolutely exhausted. I was ready to crash, and in my exhaustion had forgotten a comment that my husband made during our lunch-time phone date that had me asking if he had something up his sleeve. He wanted to know if I had an hour and a half nap, would I be ready to do something? I said sleeping until morning would be nicer, but I finally agreed to get up when he woke me up. He got the dishes done and the laundry folded while I slept, and then woke up a very grumpy wife and piled her into the truck. By then I had remembered the surprise, and from other random comments of his was starting to put together where we were going and for what. Becoming Jane was at a local theatre and he knew I’d want to see it.
The movie was good, though perhaps not quite historical – I couldn’t see Jane Austen doing some of the things that she did in the movie, but I’ll give the movie makers a bit of artistic leeway. It was as good as the recent version of Pride and Prejudice, and captured Jane Austen’s time – and attitude – well. It got me thinking about how her books – written a couple hundred years ago – are still entertaining audiences today. It’s something more than the fact that we are still dealing with the common theme of finding true love (and all the pitfalls and problems in doing so). Jane Austen not only captured her time and society, but did so in a timeless manner.
A few days later we were browsing through Chapters – something I don’t often do, as I’m usually there to get the book I want and then get out. But we had a bit of spare time, and I wandered down the fiction section, reading titles. Most of them I didn’t recognize, and the volumes of books was almost overwhelming. Yet tucked in between the other paperbacks were a few titles and authors I recognized. In fact, so many that it surprised me.
Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Joseph Conrad. Charles Dickens. Alexandre Dumas. George Eliot. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thomas Hardy. Stephen Leacock. Edgar Allen Poe. Mark Twain.
Perhaps they just keep those books on the shelves for the thousands of English students studying them in high school and university. Yet I suspect not. Many of them are coming out in nicely-bound paperback editions, not just scholarly, annotated editions. Those books are still popular a few hundred years after they were written. It’s an almost scary thought for an author. My books (if and when I get them published) will have to compete with a bunch of dead authors’ books. And while I hope that I may write something as classic and timeless as the authors I admire, it’s a high bar to compete with.
Perhaps I’ll just sit down with Elizabeth Gaskell tonight and consider that…
The movie was good, though perhaps not quite historical – I couldn’t see Jane Austen doing some of the things that she did in the movie, but I’ll give the movie makers a bit of artistic leeway. It was as good as the recent version of Pride and Prejudice, and captured Jane Austen’s time – and attitude – well. It got me thinking about how her books – written a couple hundred years ago – are still entertaining audiences today. It’s something more than the fact that we are still dealing with the common theme of finding true love (and all the pitfalls and problems in doing so). Jane Austen not only captured her time and society, but did so in a timeless manner.
A few days later we were browsing through Chapters – something I don’t often do, as I’m usually there to get the book I want and then get out. But we had a bit of spare time, and I wandered down the fiction section, reading titles. Most of them I didn’t recognize, and the volumes of books was almost overwhelming. Yet tucked in between the other paperbacks were a few titles and authors I recognized. In fact, so many that it surprised me.
Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Joseph Conrad. Charles Dickens. Alexandre Dumas. George Eliot. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thomas Hardy. Stephen Leacock. Edgar Allen Poe. Mark Twain.
Perhaps they just keep those books on the shelves for the thousands of English students studying them in high school and university. Yet I suspect not. Many of them are coming out in nicely-bound paperback editions, not just scholarly, annotated editions. Those books are still popular a few hundred years after they were written. It’s an almost scary thought for an author. My books (if and when I get them published) will have to compete with a bunch of dead authors’ books. And while I hope that I may write something as classic and timeless as the authors I admire, it’s a high bar to compete with.
Perhaps I’ll just sit down with Elizabeth Gaskell tonight and consider that…
Monday, August 13, 2007
Sticks and Stones
I've written another story for the Faithwriters' contest, called "Sticks and Stones." It's sometimes hard to write within the 750-word limit. This story, I think, will be expanded once the contest is over. There's room for a bit more development of narrative and character.
I'm in the process right now of preparing my application for grad school. I want to get into the creative writing program at UBC, so I have to present a portfolio of my writing. The hard part is picking writing that I think is good enough to get me into grad school. I've been contemplating different pieces that I've written over the past ten-odd years, though I'll probably submit something I've written in the last few years. Fiction and nonfiction genres are covered; I'm not quite as sure what to submit for a third genre. It's optional as part of my portfolio, but once I get in, I'll be required to study three genres. Something to pray and think about as I go over my writing!
I'm in the process right now of preparing my application for grad school. I want to get into the creative writing program at UBC, so I have to present a portfolio of my writing. The hard part is picking writing that I think is good enough to get me into grad school. I've been contemplating different pieces that I've written over the past ten-odd years, though I'll probably submit something I've written in the last few years. Fiction and nonfiction genres are covered; I'm not quite as sure what to submit for a third genre. It's optional as part of my portfolio, but once I get in, I'll be required to study three genres. Something to pray and think about as I go over my writing!
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Book Review: Monster
I was sitting in the cafeteria in my second year of university, studying, when suddenly I burst out laughing. My friends glanced at me, then at the thick green textbook I was reading, and raised their eyebrows. What could be so funny about biology?
We had just been studying DNA, one of few biology topics that actually interested me. I was fascinated with how DNA managed to replicate itself, over and over again, without error. The textbook went into great detail explaining the mechanisms that were in place to make sure that, if there was an error in DNA replication, it was quickly corrected.
Occasionally, however, a problem in the DNA would escape notice. This was very rare, the textbook and our professor explained. It was also very harmful. Our professor gave us a list of diseases caused by DNA replication errors. There were only about a dozen diseases on the list, all very rare and all leading to death by the time the person was a teenager. Clearly, it was vitally important that the DNA was reproduced perfectly.
Flip the page in the textbook. Here it begins explaining that we all evolved by DNA mutations. That was when I started laughing. I’m sorry, but aren’t mutations a bad thing? But, no, after explaining for pages and pages how DNA is carefully programmed to replicate without mistakes and that these mistakes are horrible when they do occur, the textbook tried to tell me that because of such mutations in our DNA, we managed to evolve from lower forms of life. Pardon me if I don’t believe that.
That’s the theme of Frank Peretti’s book Monster. My husband picked it up at the bookstore a few months back, and I finally got around to reading it this week. In the book, Burkhardt is a scientist who believes that, since “humans are 98% chimpanzee,” he can mix chimp and human DNA to create a new creature. Something bigger and better. The problem is, all he creates is monsters. Many of his creatures die before they are even born, horribly deformed; or they survive with their deformations, ugly and misshapen and barely able to function. The monster of the book is a huge, deformed chimpanzee that escapes and starts brutally killing people until it is finally found and destroyed.
Cap, a creationist and scientist, has been expelled from his position at the university for suggesting that Burkhardt is wrong. Cap is the one who discovers Burkhardt’s unethical experiments and deformed creatures, and points out that, even with carefully selected DNA mutations, nothing good had come of all the experiments. The mutations caused problems, not great scientific breakthroughs. All Burkhardt’s attempts to prove the validity of evolution failed, because evolution hinges on the idea that we mutated and evolved into better species. And science has only proved that that can’t and doesn’t happen, despite what textbooks and evolutionists might attempt to say to contrary.
We had just been studying DNA, one of few biology topics that actually interested me. I was fascinated with how DNA managed to replicate itself, over and over again, without error. The textbook went into great detail explaining the mechanisms that were in place to make sure that, if there was an error in DNA replication, it was quickly corrected.
Occasionally, however, a problem in the DNA would escape notice. This was very rare, the textbook and our professor explained. It was also very harmful. Our professor gave us a list of diseases caused by DNA replication errors. There were only about a dozen diseases on the list, all very rare and all leading to death by the time the person was a teenager. Clearly, it was vitally important that the DNA was reproduced perfectly.
Flip the page in the textbook. Here it begins explaining that we all evolved by DNA mutations. That was when I started laughing. I’m sorry, but aren’t mutations a bad thing? But, no, after explaining for pages and pages how DNA is carefully programmed to replicate without mistakes and that these mistakes are horrible when they do occur, the textbook tried to tell me that because of such mutations in our DNA, we managed to evolve from lower forms of life. Pardon me if I don’t believe that.
That’s the theme of Frank Peretti’s book Monster. My husband picked it up at the bookstore a few months back, and I finally got around to reading it this week. In the book, Burkhardt is a scientist who believes that, since “humans are 98% chimpanzee,” he can mix chimp and human DNA to create a new creature. Something bigger and better. The problem is, all he creates is monsters. Many of his creatures die before they are even born, horribly deformed; or they survive with their deformations, ugly and misshapen and barely able to function. The monster of the book is a huge, deformed chimpanzee that escapes and starts brutally killing people until it is finally found and destroyed.
Cap, a creationist and scientist, has been expelled from his position at the university for suggesting that Burkhardt is wrong. Cap is the one who discovers Burkhardt’s unethical experiments and deformed creatures, and points out that, even with carefully selected DNA mutations, nothing good had come of all the experiments. The mutations caused problems, not great scientific breakthroughs. All Burkhardt’s attempts to prove the validity of evolution failed, because evolution hinges on the idea that we mutated and evolved into better species. And science has only proved that that can’t and doesn’t happen, despite what textbooks and evolutionists might attempt to say to contrary.
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